Climate variability through the lens of applied weather index insurance in Senegal-a novel perspective on the implications of decadal variation

Weather-based index insurance is a financial instrument that allows smallholder farmers to protect themselves against climate shocks such as droughts and floods. In many cases, insurance indices are based on one or more earth observation datasets (e.g., rainfall, soil moisture, vegetative health) which are partly covering periods of more than 40 years. While remote sensing products …

Navigating Climate Disasters: Climate and Your Mind

This chapter explores how climate change and an evolving risk landscape impact disaster survivors and frontline responders, particularly emergency managers, who fall within both categories. Disasters pose strong emotional and cognitive challenges for all those who experience them. Using emergency managers as a case study, we examine climatological disasters and the process of transformation through …

Integrating Climate Disaster Risk within an Interdisciplinary Urban Agenda: Lessons Drawn from the Brazilian Experience

From a global perspective, there are significant gaps in understanding the relationship between socioeconomic and governance factors, along with the climate elements of these disasters. Without standard approaches connecting these factors to the impact of disasters, it can lead to a misrepresentation of the relationship between developing policy and standard operating procedures for risk reduction, …

Climate Change and Cognition: Towards A Pedagogy

In the aftermath of 9/11, the National Center for Disaster Preparedness (NCDP), and the Earth Institute of Columbia University launched the American Preparedness Project in order to survey public perceptions on disaster preparedness. The report found that 65% of Americans expressed worry that climate change will have an impact on their community’s exposure to disasters. …

Towards More Comprehensive Projections of Urban Heat-Related Mortality: Estimates for New York City under Multiple Population, Adaptation, and Climate Scenarios

Background: High temperatures have substantial impacts on mortality and, with growing concerns about climate change, numerous studies have developed projections of future heat-related deaths around the world. Projections of temperature-related mortality are often limited by insufficient information to formulate hypotheses about population sensitivity to high temperatures and future demographics. Objectives: The present study derived projections …

New York City Panel on Climate Change 2015 ReportChapter 5: Public Health Impacts and Resiliency

Recent experience from Hurricane Sandy and high temperature episodes has clearly demonstrated that the health of New Yorkers can be compromised by extreme coastal storms and heat events. Health impacts that can result from exposure to extreme weather events include direct loss of life, increases in respiratory and cardiovascular diseases, and compromised mental health. Other …

Heat and Mortality in New York City Since the Beginning of the 20th Century

Background: Heat is recognized as one of the deadliest weather-related phenomena. Although the impact of high temperatures on mortality has been a subject of extensive research, few previous studies have assessed the impact of population adaptation to heat. Methods: We examined adaptation patterns by analyzing daily temperature and mortality data spanning more than a century …

Climate Change and Health on the U.S. Gulf Coast: Public Health Adaptation is Needed to Address Future Risks

The impacts of climate change on human health have been documented globally and in the United States. Numerous studies project greater morbidity and mortality as a result of extreme weather events and other climate-sensitive hazards. Public health impacts on the U.S. Gulf Coast may be severe as the region is expected to experience increases in …

Temporal Variation in Heat–Mortality Associations: A Multicountry Study

Background: Recent investigations have reported a decline in the heat-related mortality risk during the last decades. However, these studies are frequently based on modeling approaches that do not fully characterize the complex temperature–mortality relationship, and are limited to single cities or countries. Objectives: We assessed the temporal variation in heat–mortality associations in a multi-country data …

Winter season mortality: will climate warming bring benefits?

Extreme heat events are associated with spikes in mortality, yet death rates are on average highest during the coldest months of the year. Under the assumption that most winter excess mortality is due to cold temperature, many previous studies have concluded that winter mortality will substantially decline in a warming climate. We analyzed whether and …

Heat-Related Mortality in a Warming Climate: Projections for 12 U.S. Cities

Heat is among the deadliest weather-related phenomena in the United States, and the number of heat-related deaths may increase under a changing climate, particularly in urban areas. Regional adaptation planning is unfortunately often limited by the lack of quantitative information on potential future health responses. This study presents an assessment of the future impacts of …

Climate Change and Health: The Nurse's Role in Policy and Practice

Widespread scientific consensus exists that the world’s climate is changing, with a majority of scientists in agreement that anthropogenic climate change is having increasingly adverse effects on human health (National Aeronautics and Space Administration [NASA] Global Climate Change, 2018; U.S. Global Change Research Program [USGCRP], 2017). Some of these changes include rising temperatures, more variable …

Climate Change and the Public's Health: The Coming Crisis for the U.S. Gulf Coast

This paper reviews the scientific consensus as to how climate change will affect human health on a global scale and describes the limited, emerging research findings concerning climate change health impacts along the U.S. Gulf Coast. Through myriad pathways, climate change is likely to make the Gulf Coast less hospitable and more dangerous for Americans, …